Spontaneous fluctuation-symmetry breaking and the Landauer principle

According to mainstream view, Landauer's erasure principle is an immediate consequence of Clausius principle (i.e., the second law of thermodynamics). So immediate that the two principles are often confused one with the other. The purpose of this work is to point out the existence of a stark demarcation line separating the two principles. The second law enjoys a fundamental status, while the Landauer's principle retains an empirical nature: the Landauer bound (i.e., $kT \ln 2$) on average dissipated heat $\langle Q \rangle$ associated to an erasure process literally emerges from the underlying second law bound (i.e., $0$), as a consequence of a mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking whereby two limits do not commute. Specifically, the limits are the thermodynamic limit of large system and the limit of infinitely large statistical sample (in terms of which the average heat $\langle Q \rangle$ is expressed), while the symmetry that is being broken is the fluctuation symmetry (the Tasaki-Crooks fluctuation relation). We illustrate and corroborate our theory with numerical simulations of the process of erasure performed on a 2D Ising ferromagnet.